Might makes right

“Might makes right” is both an explicit libertine argument and a recurring description of the power relations that govern Justine’s world. The claim that the stronger party has the better reason turns poverty into a supposed obligation to submit, recasts criminal advantage as rational self-interest, and helps explain why Justine’s innocence repeatedly fails to protect her. The narrative puts that doctrine beside the outcomes it produces: vulnerable people are coerced or silenced, while well-connected offenders can escape consequences even after the law recognizes their crimes.

The Maxim as an Argument

When Coeur-de-fer tries to prevent Justine from escaping his band, he presents her poverty and their control of her as sufficient grounds for obedience. He insists that she must serve either the band’s interests or its members’ desires, then offers protection from a worse fate only if she accepts his personal control. His argument culminates in the declaration that “the stronger is always the better reason.” The maxim is not an abstract observation in this scene: it is the rationale by which a captor turns possession into authority and demands that his victim regard submission as the only practical choice.

Coeur-de-fer develops the claim by attacking the moral meaning Justine gives to chastity and virtue. He argues that physical integrity is insignificant to God and society, and that a woman’s resistance supposedly opposes Nature’s purposes. He then presents a less direct form of exploitation as a concession to her fears. His reasoning makes coercion sound like accommodation: he names the options himself, defines her values as irrational, and treats his ability to impose terms as evidence that those terms are justified. The scene exposes the gap between an argument framed as reason and the coercive power that makes refusal dangerous.

From Private Force to Political Theory

The doctrine expands beyond the band’s immediate control of Justine. The libertine account of society argues that a social pact is unfair to both strong and weak: the weak surrender what little they possess, while the strong are asked to give up advantages they could use to satisfy themselves. It therefore presents the return to conflict as preferable to an agreement that limits individual power. From this premise follows a strategy of violating the pact whenever doing so may improve one’s position. The argument makes criminal self-interest appear not as an exception to the system but as a calculated response to it.

Its starkest formulation reduces the choice to “crime, which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy.” That conclusion gives the doctrine its polemical force: law becomes a threat to be weighed against private gain, not a shared restraint that protects people from one another. The text also lets the argument’s social assumptions show. The weak are described as having little to bargain with, while the powerful imagine themselves injured by limits on their freedom. The supposed universal rule thus reproduces an unequal starting point: those who already command force can risk breaking the pact in ways that the vulnerable cannot.

The Maxim Enforced in Justine’s Story

The argument returns in the treatment of Justine by the Comte de Bressac. After she acts against his plan and informs his aunt, he accuses her of betraying the person to whom she supposedly owes her happiness. He says that she should have refused rather than chosen what he calls the worse crime, and blames her for jeopardizing his freedom. His accusation turns gratitude into a demand for complicity: because he had once spared her, he claims a right to her loyalty even when that loyalty would require her to assist wrongdoing.

Bressac then makes the power behind his moral language unmistakable. He has intercepted the messages that might have exposed him, and he tells Justine that her actions have endangered her without saving his aunt. He predicts that he will inherit the fortune, while she will die, and frames her fate as proof that the virtuous road is not always the safest. The threat is enacted through his control over her: he has her taken to the place where he had previously bound her, and his servants carry out the assault he has arranged. His words do not establish that his conduct is right; they reveal how a person with wealth, servants, and command over a victim can make his preferred account of events seem consequentially decisive.

The episode also exposes the difference between formal justice and private power. Bressac claims that handing Justine to the courts would cost her life, and presents his own violence as the more deliberate alternative. In practice, his control lets him punish her outside a legal process while protecting the inheritance he expects to receive. His aunt dies, and he inherits more than six hundred thousand francs in cash and valuables. The relatives lament her death and express a desire for vengeance, but leave him in possession of his gains. Justine’s resistance has not saved the intended victim, and the apparent triumph of the stronger party makes Bressac’s doctrine look descriptively powerful even as the narrative presents its moral corruption.

Enclosed Power and Impunity

The same principle governs the secluded monastery in which Justine is held. One of its inhabitants describes the site’s barriers, guarded passages, and concealed tunnel as making escape practically impossible. The monks’ isolation from outside scrutiny enables them to act with confidence that their victims will be their only witnesses. In this account, impunity is not simply a personal advantage: it is built into a place designed to prevent the law and the public from seeing what happens there.

The monastery’s rules make the unequal value assigned to lives especially plain. Sick captives are left without religious ministrations; their bodies are discarded in the spaces between the walls. If illness becomes severe or contagion is feared, the institution may remove a person before death rather than risk the health of the others. The stated calculation treats an individual girl as readily replaceable. Such arrangements turn confinement into a system in which those who control the walls decide who may remain, who may be abandoned, and whether a victim can survive long enough to be heard.

A similar private sovereignty governs the Comte de Gernande’s château. He tells Justine that, because he has taken her without anyone to whom he must answer, he can make her disappear without inviting inquiry. Her prospects, he says, are happiness if she behaves and death if she betrays him; he concludes that she must obey because he has her. The threat explicitly connects ownership, secrecy, and control over life. In this closed setting, Justine has been removed not only from freedom but from the ordinary protections that might make an appeal possible.

Rescue, Legal Recognition, and the Limits of Redress

Justine’s position changes when Monsieur de Corville and Madame de Lorsange encounter her under guard. She is being transferred after a Lyon conviction on accusations of murder, theft, and arson; the stated procedure would take her to Paris for confirmation before returning her to Lyon for execution. Moved by her condition and doubtful that the case is just, Monsieur de Corville takes responsibility for her and arranges for her to tell her story at Montargis. The frame of her testimony matters: where prior authorities treated an accusation as enough to condemn her, a listener with social standing gives her account a chance to be heard.

The revelation that Madame de Lorsange is Justine’s sister further alters the scene. Their reunion makes Justine’s concealed identity known, while Monsieur de Corville acts on what he has learned: he writes to the Lord Chancellor, vouches for her innocence, and arranges to take her into his protection pending clarification of the case. His intervention shows that the law can be enlisted against a false conviction, but it also highlights how dependent that correction is on a powerful advocate willing to act. Justine’s own innocence has not, by itself, secured her safety.

The King’s letters eventually annul the proceedings against her, restore her standing as an honest citizen, silence the tribunals that had sought to defame her, and award her an annual income of a thousand crowns, funded by interest on gold seized from the counterfeiters’ workshop in Dauphine. Yet the resolution does not vindicate a simple belief that law reliably defeats force. Cardoville has been appointed to a provincial administration and Saint-Florent to the supervision of Colonial Trade before their crimes can be brought to account. Powerful families quiet the resulting scandal, and the men remain installed in positions of fortune and authority. Justine receives recognition and material support, but the offenders’ advancement gives the maxim a final, bitter afterlife: official remedies can help the persecuted without dismantling the structures that let the powerful prosper.